I was watching "Sweeny Todd" last night and was thinking that it was a great example of a Reaper Toxic physical adept (I know I need to get out more.) I guess the song Epiphany (this takes you to a Youtube video of the song with the lyrics) sums up the entire Toxic philosophy.

However it does seem that from a GM standpoint Toxics are really hard to use properly. They usually come off as cartoony or just stupidly evil. They come across like some type of bad guy from Captain Planet and I think that's why I don't really hear much about people using them.

How do people use Toxic's in your game or what are the reasons that you don't use them?

We went another direction with our game. We gots us some evil heebie-jeebies but they're more of the traditional demonic types.

I use them, but I try not to make them "cartoony", well any more cartoony then any other aspect of a world where I play up the 80s Pink Mohawk feel of a Cyberpunk society and a dying world.

But then again, Blood Magic is a fairly common practice, wageslaves are really screwed, the Middle Class is laregly a myth -- you are either poor or ultra rich, the cops are thugs with guns and not really any better then the gang, ect..

I guess that's the point. With Insect spirits, Faustian Mages, Shediem and a slew of other choices that are just "easier" to crank up the fear factor, who is going to risk some one in the group going "By our powers combined!!!" before laying into that smog spirit and ruining the mood. Lets face it a giant man eating ant or demon is a hell of a lot scarier than a fire elemental with some extra powers.

My group plays them dark. For example the one that wants to get rid of life can be played quite dark.

During one run we faced a toxic shaman in a warehouse filled much like the two bomb scene in the dark knight. Need less to say, we were about to kill him when he soaked himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire.

The only time I ever used a toxic was to help the party. I think that scared them worse than if I attacked them with it. They were doing a data retrieval run against a corporation that was heavily into recycling and environmental cleanup when the mage was astrally perceiving and saw something he didn't like.

I basically play toxics as socially awkward but as an absolutely terrifying presence. They say very little and just exude oily/greasy ectoplasm wherever they manifest and every good role player who's playing a mage sits in his chair and whimpers.

You know, I've only used toxics a couple times, and only once recently.

I threw in a couple "weak" toxic shamans as an excuse to muck with the background count of a location the runner were hitting. They never encountered the PCs (the session was dragging and I wanted to wrap things up), but they made a mess of the astral around the target, leaving big, sticky, oily patches of contamination that freaked out the PC mage and the NPC shaman she was astrally projecting with.

-paws